Medical Assistants Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

A percentile marks a point in this occupation's pay distribution: the worker one quarter of the way up the Medical Assistants ladder earns the 25th percentile wage, $37,610. BLS top-codes very high wages ($239,200+ a year, $115.00+ an hour) and marks estimates it cannot publish as n/p.

Employment and concentration

With 793,460 jobs nationally, Medical Assistants make up 0.51% of U.S. employment as BLS measured it in May 2024. The map is uneven: California alone holds 110,350 of those jobs, the top three states hold 30.6%, and the deepest concentration sits in Alaska (location quotient 1.46, where 1.00 is the national average). A quotient above 2 usually signals a local industry cluster rather than evenly spread demand.

Pay inside the occupation is wide: $22,810 separates the ends of its ladder. The 90th percentile ($57,830) is 1.7 times the 10th percentile ($35,020), a gap of $22,810 a year. The mean of $44,720 sitting above the median of $44,200 tells you the top end pulls the average up: most workers cluster below the mean, and the high tail is thin.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 51 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $55,120; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Medical Assistants stands number 47 by employment and number 650 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Healthcare Support Occupations, the group median wage is $41,590 across 17 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 6% more than its group median, and it supplies 10.7% of the group's 7,448,000 jobs. In 22 of the 51 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $44,200, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 45,710 jobs, 5.8% of the national total. The first table ranks metros by employment; the second ranks them by mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs in the occupation, because a three-person metro can top a pay table by accident.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, San Juan-Bayamon-Caguas, PR posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $28,430 a year, against $66,280 in Vallejo, CA. A gap that size between two metro labor markets is why the same occupation title can fund two very different budgets in two different cities.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Medical Assistants paycheck, gross, is $1,700 every two weeks on an annual $44,200, which is $3,683 a month and $850 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($37,610) to the 75th ($48,160) is worth $10,550 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $48,620 would sit between the median ($44,200) and the 75th percentile ($48,160), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $37,610, is $6,590 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations

Sibling occupations in Healthcare Support Occupations: Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers, Physical Therapist Assistants, Healthcare Support Workers, All Other, Massage Therapists, Medical Equipment Preparers, Orderlies. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.